MILFORD – Doug Sutherland, who is black and lives in Hancock, was visiting Maine one day and getting coffee at his favorite cafe when “an older white gentleman” started talking to him about his “black experience” with a boss who long ago encouraged him, and now he is rich.

“I had ice coffees in my hands, and I was trying to be respectful,” Sutherland said, and the stranger ended up telling him a sexual and racial joke.

Sutherland is the summer camp director of the Barbara C. Harris Center in Greenfield and owns a staff training and team building business. He told this story at a Wadleigh Memorial Library program last week, one of three African Americans who shared their personal experiences of being black in the United States.

After the iced coffee incident, Sutherland said he became determined never to let himself be used like that again.

“I realized I can’t just stand there and not say something … and smile when someone is just trying to alleviate some guilt,” he said. “We can talk, but I don’t want to hear your black story.”

Moderator Allen Davis had arranged the room so the three African Americans, who all live in the Hancock-Peterborough area and had volunteered, sat in a small inner circle and their mostly white audience sat in the outer circle to listen.

Grace Aldrich grew up in Dorchester, Mass. with biracial parents who never talked about race, she said. When she was a baby and they moved into a new home, police came by to say “welcome to the neighborhood” and told her mother that there are a lot of black people in the neighborhood. Her mother told them there is one upstairs – baby Grace was sleeping.

About five years ago, Aldrich, who has a young son, became obsessed with the news of unarmed black men being killed by police.

“I watched (videos) over and over to see why they had to die,” she said.

Two years later, Donald Trump was elected president. “A lot of people were in shock,” she said, “but I understood it had a lot to do with race” and the election of Barack Obama for two terms.

Jim Guy, now semi-retired and president of the Monadnock Rotary Club, talked about growing up in Cleveland, Ohio in the early 1950s. He wasn’t aware of being different until his family moved to a new, and whiter, neighborhood.

“I was made very much aware I was different, and I internalized it,” he said. By third grade he had gotten the message that he was “not as good as they were.”

Davis, an educator and social justice advocate, had centered the forum around four questions: When did you first know you were black? What was your experience growing up, as well as your experience living in southern New Hampshire? Did your parents give you “the talk” about police?

With a few exceptions, living here has been mostly good, the three said.

But Sutherland said he is always conscious of the perils of being black. He sometimes works as a disc jockey and once lent a friend his equipment. When his friend was finished with the equipment he said Sutherland could take it from his garage. The friend didn’t understand why he wouldn’t do that.

“I know the neighbors have seen me,” he said, “but there was no way I was going to that garage and taking out sound equipment. It would have probably been OK, but …”

Even walking home from bartending at Harlow’s Pub in Peterborough would worry him and he worries about his 8-year-old daughter. He has taken her to the Hancock police, and the reason he did annoyed him.

“I did it so she wouldn’t get hurt,” he said.

Aldrich, a massage therapist and storyteller, worries that her son’s friends will take him places where he will stand out and be vulnerable. Her white friends have trouble understanding why she hesitates to go to certain places, and

“I end up comforting them, because of their discomfort with my reality,” she said.

Davis’ fourth question, What can people here do to support you?, was scheduled to be asked at the second part of the session on April 30, when members of the original audience were invited back.

Briefly answering that question at the first meeting, Guy and Sutherland both said white people should listen and not be afraid of making mistakes.

“Things aren’t said because of fear of making mistakes. I too will make mistakes,” Sutherland said, so just own it and move on.

Guy said people could “join groups that can make a more just and loving world,” and Aldrich said it would help if people “understood the history of whiteness in the United States.”

Last year Davis organized similar forums in the Peterborough area. The first one, at the Peterborough Public Library, attracted more than 80 residents.

“After being stunned and horrified by the 2016 election,” he said in an email, “I realized that race is America’s issue and that it pervades and infects every political, economic, and social policy and discussion. I decided to use my white privilege to create greater interracial understanding and encourage white people to become racial justice activists.”

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